jabo's book

About me: My name is Jannis (Yuh-Nizz), I'm 21, from Germany, right at the end of my media design apprenticeship. I've found back to art in spring '06 after a long pause. I've been doing all kinds of creative hobbies in the last 10 years, including level design, 3d-modeling, texturing, photographing, web design and of course graphic design, the latter three being what I have been doing professionaly for the past 3-4 years.

About my so-called art: I have much too learn. I probably already drew pictures before I could speak, but now I started painting for the first time. Digitally, because I love the medium and color range. Quick and sketchy, because I'm impatient by nature. Environments, because it's the most thrilling aspect in my opinion.

Alright. I started this sketchbook out of pure desperation with no particular art in the back, so here are some of my speedies to fill up. Updates by chance.

Here's something I've been working on and off for the last week with a modified oil-brush (camelhair). The first Painter brush that fits my needs because I can nudge and paint at the same time without having too much trouble with Painter saturation-system. Probably around 3 hours in. Now I'm stuck. I don't know what else to put in. A creature would be cool but there's no space left.

really nice enviroments. They all have a nice ambience and lighting. I want to see you tighten some areas up and work on adding some more details...but I like your sketchy style. I think you did a good job with that on the one with the red-lit rocks and water.

Thanks for your comment, and thanks for the praise of the ambience. That's what I'm focussing on at the moment. You're right about the pics being rather sketchy, I'm trying to keep the output high and I'm quite happy about where the "style" is going right now.

THIS IS MEANT TO BE A PERSONAL RETROSPECT OF THE YEAR 06 (AND 05, I HAD NO CHANCE TO REVIEW 05 BECAUSE 06 WAS SUCH A MESSY YEAR), AND WHAT IT MEANT TO ME. NEW PIECES FIRST, MOSTLY.

I'm afraid of posting this in the FF-section. It IS finished, but I guess the thread would descend so fast it's even better to post it here in my sketchyard.

A while ago I was to make some drafts of posters that a client wanted to put into his offices. The client decided to be an asshole and told us he didn't want to posters anymore, like... after 2 weeks. Some posters had been done already, so we decided to put some of them into our own office. One of them was my typo-ant (typomeise). Here it is:

My traineeship is almost over. Applied exams are in January, written exams are OVER! So here's a fictional magazine I made in my first year of traineeship. Rather fugly now.

And some random graphic design I've been doing last year when I still had motivation to do this stuff. It's badly executed compared to what I do nowadays, but at least I had ideas:

omg Oo

And here is a guy I made solely to print them in RGB on a Pictrography photoprinter. Colorful, high-saturated pictures with excellent brilliance. You just can't achieve that in Offset or digital printing. I wanted to post another one of them, but I can't find the InDesign file to make a PDF. I'll make up for that.

A those enviros are very(!) well painted, but think there shoud be some action going on. maybe include some humans, vehicles, whatever. great stuff! wanna see more,... mooooore
edit: that doesnt mean the last post

EDIT: h2rra: Well, gloomy doesn't neccessarily mean dark or bloodthirsty IMHO. As the saying goes, you're often more exited about things you don't see. I love suggesting stuff that isn't really there. Fool the eye, make it want to explore what's around the corner.

I'm fighting a bad flu at the moment and am also suffering of a weird kind of insomnia that doesn't let me fall asleep at nights. I'm used to sleeping short-time every night but no sleep at all is bugging me to a point of complete madness. Hope I can get some sleep tonight...

EDIT: Yah, overslept today and was half an hour late for work. It worked, 5 hours of glorious snooze. So, maybe I'll paint another speedy today.

you're sick... i sometimes sleep 12 hours a day, but at least 8 hours!
those clouds in he last one are pretty impressive and i like the mood and overall-look of the picture. but i think the ultra-detailed (and very cool) clouds dont work with the undetailed ship (and rock?). maybe some textures thrown onto the ship could work well.

Hehe. I was never a big fan of sleeping. When I was in 8th grade or something, I used to go to bed at 3 am and wake up at 7 (when i didn't oversleep). It's all a matter of will. I usually can't sleep when I'm not really tired, so I usually go to bed at 2 am nowadays. The night is a mysterious time, it's all dimmed and quiet. Why should you waste it by sleeping. It depends on your genes of course, but I know a lot of people sleeping 12 hours a day (HALF OF THE F****** DAY, PICTURE IT!), and they're dozy all day long, while I'm full awake and active. The more you sleep, the more sleepy you are when you don't sleep.

Okay, back to the pics: The cloud-one is a WIP (I usually don't post wips). The clouds are done with both the brush-tool and the smudge-tool using a semicircle-shaped brush without spacing. That allows you to scatter the picture when moving the smudge-tool fast and blend stuff by moving slowly. It was a test and I was adding the crawler robot later to add some action.

About mood: As I said in my edited post above, hiding things is very effective when you want to add mystery. Varying diffuse and sharp edges works wonders. I'm having trouble with line directions though. Mine always disturb the balance and distract the eye (see the meteor-at-bay-picture. Too many directions). Gotta work on that.

Color is a tough nut to crack. I mainly use complementary colours. I always work from cool (green-mint-turquoise-cyan-lightblue-darkblue) to warm (purple-magenta-cherry-red-red/orange-orange-yellow), giving cool more room than warm (see Colour Contrasts and especially Quantitätskontrast). It's all theory, it doesn't always work and it doesn't always HAVE to work this way, but knowing the theory helps a lot. About picking palettes: I saw that in some screenshots of HPX, building your own palette and stuff. I tried, but it's too limiting IMHO. I have F5 set to display the colour-info, which is on HSV/HSB(German) mode. I pick a colour I have set, alter the hue, saturation and brightness (the latter two should be moved oppositely. When you increase saturation, decrease brightness, and vice versa) and paint over. You can play with gradients for mist, adding depth and believability.

On a more philosophical approach, I always try to imagine the soundscape that accompanies the painting. For this one I imagined the constant sound of the lake, a breeze waving through the treetops, birds chirping, and the low hum of the ships fusion gear, something like that. Then for the monoliths, it's the loud sound of ice cracking and the whispering of the wind on the structures' slants. And this one was accompanied by an all-surrounding deep hum of wind blowing through a canyon, frogs croacking, crickets, and other mysterious animals awaiting you when you enter the valley.

I was thinking of making a video of one of my paintings, but it's never clear at the beginning if it's gonna work or not. But thanks for sticking by me, makes me feel warm inside

So, here's one from today. I received Scott Robertsons Unique Enviro DVD yesterday (10 bucks for customs, you fools!) and watched it. It's a blast. Not really dependable if you're up for something particular, but it's a sheer boost for your creativity. You learn to see things. This one is just a first try, I'm not too good with the wide copics and didn't have the right paper to smudge around the ink, but cool enough.

On a personal note, I'm close to overcoming my neurosis and hopefully found a way to make up a nice website that fits my demands, looks good and is innovative in some way.

Okay, and here's my first pencil drawing since... July '06 I guess. A little rusty, the old flaws didn't vanish by not drawing... Props to the guy who invented this strange looking crown. Sorry for the bad camera quality, I'll scan it at work tomorrow.

Hey jabo. Great speedpaints. I especially like the more recent one with the laser going through the smoke and how the light affects it. Great stuff here, definitely an inspiration. Nice graphic stuff too. Moar plz =)

Thank you very much for that answer. very helpful and very interesting! thx
Any progress on the wip to show?

I like the last one a lot, cool comp. my ony crit would be, that the image is divided into the left haf which is dynamic and full of live and stuff, and the right half, which is dead and still.
On the other hand, this is good, cause it adds to the atmosphere of a dead planet... But then again, there's this bunny - hmmm, dunno, i'm confused right now ^^